


(you're still all over me) [like a wine-stained dress]

by Feather (lalaietha)



Series: (even if i could) make a deal with god [your blue-eyed boys related short-fic] [80]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Bucky and Natasha becoming prickly spiritual twins, Bucky's total failure to recognize his own massive psychological progress, Childhood Abuse, Childhood Trauma, Clint Barton's ethics, Conditioning, Disabled Character, Mentally Ill Character, Other, backstory: Natalia Romanova, childhood exploitation, trauma-bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-05
Updated: 2015-09-05
Packaged: 2018-04-19 02:36:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4729541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lalaietha/pseuds/Feather
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This year was always going to be bad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. revelation

**Author's Note:**

> This story establishes Natasha's backstory for this verse; part of both [to see you there] and [(even if I could) make a deal with god](http://archiveofourown.org/series/132585), and also while it doesn't really fall under any of the major archive warnings, because it's a fairly big thing I would add a **content note** for discussion of the grooming, abuse and exploitation of a child, of the sort one would expect of a program that turns little girls into assassins. 
> 
> As always this verse is non-AoU compliant, and accordingly Natasha's backstory has been adjusted somewhat so that it makes any sense to me at all.

That morning, Tasha wakes up beside him gasping for air. She jerks herself upright, leaning on one hand. 

They fell asleep on the couch, in front of the TV. Not really planned, but they didn't exactly do anything to avoid it, either. They both knew what the next day was and besides, despite the advice of endless SHIELD-employed occupational therapists, "bed" is only a natural place for either of them to sleep about six days out of ten. And even that's a lot better than Clint'd been when Coulson'd talked him into working for SHIELD in the first place: he'd spent a lot of his life before that sleeping on couches and mattresses on floors and for that matter, floors without the mattress. Beds were for hotels, or when they had other people in them. 

When Clint got his first real apartment he slept on the second-hand couch he bought for most of the first year, and used the bed to sort laundry. 

They'd been watching one of the Korean shows that Barnes's somehow got Nat (and Potts, and Ross, and Foster, and seriously what the fuck) turned onto, one that Nat could find subtitled; now the TV and the machine (of who-the-fuck-knows-if-this-is-even-legal design, provided by Stark to everyone with any kind of room in the Tower) are both asleep and slower to wake up than Clint is. 

Sleep clings to his head like sticky fingers, reflexes slipping free and ready to stop someone from killing him but higher functions stuck and stuttering. Tasha's touching her face and raking her fingers through her hair by the time he's sorted out: bad dream, bad wake-up, bad night, anniversary day. 

Fantastic. 

She throws the blanket off and gets to her feet, almost scrambling. All her movements are off, more awkward than normal. Almost adolescent.

Even more fantastic. 

Clint scrubs his face and restricts the question to one syllable: "Nat?" he asks, quietly. He leans on one forearm, turned towards her, and waits. 

She's pulling on her jeans and scraping her hand over the side-table looking for the hair-clip she took out last night; it's actually on the couch, and Clint hands it to her. He pretty much knows what the answer's going to be by the part where she doesn't look at him to take it. 

"I need to go - go out," is all she says. She pulls her leather jacket off the hook and half-throws it on, stabbing her arms through the holes and shrugging it up onto her shoulders. She grabs one of the purses she's using right now from off the side-board near the door and puts on the closest pair of shoes - kitten heels - without socks. She doesn't stop to lock the door behind her before she's gone. 

The purse she took's the one that keeps a pack of cigarettes in it, Clint thinks, which at least means she's at most only likely to break the arm of someone who deserves it for harassing a lone woman out for a smoke. Could be worse. 

He sighs, leans back against the arm of the couch and scrubs a hand over his face. He's pretty sure his phone is over in his jacket, on the hook. He does not feel like going to find it yet. 

"JARVIS," he says instead, gives it a second for the voice-code to catch the AI's attention, because the agreement is the camera feeds for his floor and Tasha's are (like the actual floors) only accessible to the two of them, unlocked by voice-print, and JARVIS very politely doesn't pay attention most of the time unless they actually call on him. Clint's not sure how that works, exactly, but it's the kind of take-on-faith thing you have to do if you want to have any kind of relationship with other people. 

The kind where you know you can't make it so that people _can't_ fuck you over, so you just decide to believe they're not going to. You take it on faith and let the chips fall where they may.

"Sir?" says the space up near the corner of the door, inquisitive and polite, and Clint sits up, rolling his neck. 

"What time is it?" he starts with, because he realizes he has no idea: the shades on his windows make the place just about as dark as a cave, minus the light of the sleeping TV and the kitchen: it could be noon for all he knows. 

It occurs to him that the bare bones of this, at least, have got to be pretty familiar to the AI: sudden wake up, sudden departure of the female occupant of the room, and then a request for the time. The reasons couldn't be more different, but it's still an amusing thought. 

"Zero-four-hundred, sir," JARVIS replies, which nixes worry about it being late. Clint gets up and goes over to the window to palm the pad for the shade, reassured that he isn't going to get stabbed in the eyes by miserably bright light. He scratches his fingers over his own scalp for the sleep itch, and sighs again. 

"Does Natasha keep her calendar - the one linked to her phone, I mean," he clarifies, squinting at the pre-dawn grey, "is it stored somewhere you can see it?" 

Not that he thinks Natasha has any other calendar, because anything she wouldn't keep on her phone she wouldn't even write down on a piece of paper and anything she does put down in her phone is because it's unimportant enough she can stop spending that much effort remembering it and let the phone remind her, but specificity never hurt anyone. 

Actually that's a lie, it's hurt a lot of people a lot of times, but he still'd rather be as specific as he can. The point is, he keeps his phone synced to his laptop here, which means JARVIS could pull it for her, but he can't off the top of his head remember where Tasha's syncing hers.

"Yes, sir," JARVIS says, and helpfully adds, "today she is scheduled to meet Captain Rogers for lunch at twelve-forty-five." 

"Thanks," Clint says, absently. After thinking for a second, _now_ he goes to hunt for his phone so he can text Steve with _you should double-check if Nat's coming to lunch_ and _don't ask_ and then throw his phone down on the ottoman in front of the sectional and try to think about what the fuck _he_ wants to do with the rest of the day. 

Normally, he wouldn't send that kind of text; normally, it'd never cross his mind that Tasha might not only break a lunch-date but forget to let the person know, not give a reason and it definitely wouldn't be up to him to sort it out. 

Today's pretty inevitably not fucking normal, though. So today he does.

In the end, for himself, he decides on an hour on Stark's glorified jungle-gym and then a really, really hot shower. 

 

This year was always going to be bad. They've both known it, and both spent most of the last month pretending they weren't pretending that the day wasn't coming up fast, which is probably why Tasha made a lunch date in the first place. Or maybe she was being excessively hopeful, like hassling Steve Rogers into relaxing for a bit would let her skip the worst of it. 

Clint's pretty sure that's why _he_ tried for the bad Korean soap opera marathon last night. Not that it was ever going to work, but maybe it _might_ and if it was going to go badly - as it so obviously fucking is - then nothing's going to make it better anyway, so why the fuck not. 

That's the kind of logic that can get you into some unfortunate situations, Clint knows from experience, but it's also pretty much the kind of logic that inevitably applies. Sometimes there's no way to _avoid_ the unfortunate situations, because they've been dogging your heels for a long time and they know where you sleep. 

So once he's exhausted himself to the point where he can't hold his hand out without it shaking, he steams himself red in the shower, throws on a long-sleeved shirt and a jacket, grabs his sunglasses and escapes the Tower himself, in an attempt not to sit and stew. 

At around oh-six-hundred he gets a return text from Steve, asking him if something's up, and he sends back _nothing urgent_ and then decides to ignore his phone for another few hours. It's not like Tasha's likely to call and if he ignores it altogether he won't get edgy about the fact that she hasn't. 

And the one thing you can say for New York is that it's always good for a distraction: even if for once nothing's actually going on, find somewhere to sit and watch for twenty minutes and the crowds'll come up with something all by themselves. So that's basically what he does, moving from bench to cafe to wall to what the fuck ever, watching and trying not to think too much. It just never ends well, times like this. 

It's probably a good thing Fury's off the grid somewhere in fucking Europe, Clint reflects. If the man were accessible, Clint's not sure he'd be able to sit on the impulse to find him and punch him in the face. And he's actually pretty sure that he _doesn't_ really want to do that, or at least won't want to do it when it's not today and Fury's fucking choices haven't made a bad day a lot worse. 

Not actually fair, anyway. On a good day, Clint knows that, completely believes that. It's not that Fury didn't have a choice, not that he didn't fuck up: he did, and Clint's pretty sure he knows it, too. It'd be hard to _miss_ the way Natasha's shut down, pulled away. The part where she's _not_ in fucking Europe helping would be a big clue. And besides, five minutes' thought would tell you that letting Natalia Romanova know you don't trust her - especially when she does your dirty work - is a really, _really_ bad plan if you want her to keep doing it. 

On the other hand expecting five minutes worth of that kind of thought from a man whose mentor just turned out to be the monster at the end of the movie, _and_ whose same mentor just had him mobbed, blown up, hunted down and shot ( _through a wall_ ) by a previously semi-mythical super-assassin? Expecting five minutes of thought from a man who'd just about almost died of all that and was on fuck knew how many painkillers at the time, who also just found out his organization was riddled with holdover Nazis who'd been specifically using _him_ to further their plan to take over the world, and who - let's be fair here - came by a wide range of paranoias and feelings of persecution by those very honest routes you end up with when you work your way up in an organization like SHIELD and you aren't a well-off white guy from the right university . . . . well. 

Expecting that's kind of beyond the pale of "reasonable". 

_Actually_ not trusting Natasha's a lot stupider, in a special kind of way, but Clint's worked on the assumption that if Fury could cut his own brain in half and make sure the left side doesn't know what the right side's doing, he'd've done so years ago, because jobs like "Director of SHIELD" make people crazy and that crazy makes them stupid in those special ways. Hell, even being Director of Ops _for_ SHIELD had been slowly edging Coulson into crazy for years, before it killed him, and Phil Coulson was a lot saner than Nick Fury to start with. 

And on a good day Clint knows all of that and takes it into account, just like he takes most of this kind of shit for everyone into account, because life's a lot easier if you keep your expectations where they should be, not only because it saves being disappointed but also because it saves you from being a royal dick to people already dealing with a lot of shit and probably more than you could if you were them. On a good day.

Today's just not a good day, and _today_ he kind of wants to break Fury's nose for being stupid enough not to _know_ the only things Natalia wouldn't do for him is kill Clint or a kid that wasn't trying to kill her, and most especially for letting her find _out_ that he didn't know that. Right now Clint's temper doesn't give a shit about any of the other stuff. 

He is, Clint realizes, in a truly foul fucking mood. Maybe edging into vicious. And that he needs to get a handle on, because that ends bad places, places he doesn't want to go. 

Something bumps against his leg and he looks over to see a mid-sized mutt nudging at his knee and giving him the look that says it wants him to pet it. A flushed, chubby Japanese-looking chick in jogging gear hurries over, apologizing for the dog being a bother, and Clint summons up enough energy to be personable for a couple minutes and reassure her that it's fine: dogs do this, hell all animals do this, and he likes them anyway. 

They end up chatting for a bit about principles of non-violence in animal training, which Clint is basically all for, and Hannah (which is what her name turns out to be) tells him about training for a half-marathon and after about twenty minutes of that he's at least less likely to punch some jerk for bumping into him on the sidewalk, Hannah looks cheerful and the dog looks happy. Could be worse. 

 

Eventually his phone actually rings. It startles him: he can't think of a single person he knows who'd choose voice over text. Then, as he thumbs the spot to answer the call from Steve's phone, he notices that he's got about five _texts_ from Steve he's been ignoring, which almost certainly explains that. He probably should've expected it. If anyone's primed to have overactive worry-about-other-people going on right now, it's probably Captain America. 

"Sorry," Clint says, when the phone connects, "phone was on silent." 

"No problem," Steve says, which he'd probably say even if he's been anxiously staring at his screen for hours because that's just the kind of agreeable guy Steve is, or at least tries hard to be. It's almost like his subconscious feels the need to compensate for the places in his life where he's the world's biggest contrary bastard by being easy to get along with every other way he can be. "I was just wondering - " Steve hesitates and then asks, "Is something up? Wrong, I mean?" 

Yeah, Clint reflects, he probably should have expected this: Rogers lives his whole life attuned to something going even a little bit wrong, these days, and Clint knows damn well that kind of stuff doesn't actually restrict itself consistently to the thing you're actually worried about, even while it can actually make you totally blind to other shit right under your nose. Human existence, a case study, that one. 

"Natasha just never got back to me - " Steve adds, in the pause and Clint pinches the bridge of his nose. 

"So there's a long version and a short version," he tells Steve, coming down on the side of, Nat spends enough time poking Steve Rogers' life with sticks that it's fair he gets to know about some of hers, since she hasn't actually gone so far as to say Clint should keep it to himself. "Short version is it's a shitty anniversary and she's having a bad day, but it's just that." 

"And the long version?" Steve asks, and it's not the first time Clint's almost wanted to start laughing, not just at how Steve's as transparent as a wet white t-shirt at least, but at how all of them - him, Clint, Tasha, hell probably even Barnes - seem to cope with being fucked up or stressed out by fussing about someone else. 

"The long version is I need a drink if I'm going through the fucking long version," he replies, and then snorts and adds, "and since I just realized I haven't had a single damn meal yet today I should probably eat first. You want the long version," he concludes, "pick some place that serves liquor and food." 

 

The place Steve names is small and kind of hipster, or possibly what hipsters aspire to be and fall short of, given there's nothing pseudo-ironic or detached at the enthusiastic way the server-slash-co-owner recommends their roasted beef-bone marrow and offers to help Clint find the perfect bourbon pair. In fact her enthusiasm might actually rival Steve for sincerity. It's kinda cute. 

He lets her pick a bourbon, because fuck, it seems like it'll make her feel accomplished and somebody might as well have a good day, and bourbon'll take the edge off his desire to hurt people as much as the next drink. He skips the marrow, though, and goes for a burger instead, on the basis that he's yet to find even a hipster-joint burger he can't eat but he has encountered some really spectacularly _inedible_ other things in some of these places. 

Steve's already sitting down when Clint gets there, and Clint'd give good odds that whether Steve realizes it or not said, owner-server knows exactly who Steve is and so she can probably make a good guess who Clint is, but she's definitely working hard to be the kind of New Yorker who doesn't care about that kind of thing. 

The part where she comes and hovers over them with her excited explanation of the features basically the second Clint sits down at the table only undermines that a little. 

He glances at Steve and feels his mouth quirk; once the server's gone, he says, "So. How's _your_ day going?" 

Steve grimaces in a way that's probably supposed to be some kind of self-deprecating smile. "Call it one of those days the recursive circle of guilt and worry just gets ridiculous," he says, "and sometimes I'm smart enough to figure out getting out and doing something else is a better idea. Not always. But sometimes." 

"Thus, the quick decision," Clint observes and Steve acknowledges that with a shrug. 

"And I'd be a liar if I said I never got curious," he adds. His expression turns into a balancing act of put-upon good humour. "I mean, everyone gets to know my life-story, even some bits of it I'd never really've chosen to share if I'd thought about it. Sometimes it kinda feels unfair." 

Then for a second he looks worried and like he's hesitating, before he says, "She okay?" 

The owner-server brings Clint the bourbon and Steve a beer, and Clint takes a sip before he answers, rolling it around his mouth for a second. Then he puts the glass down and says, "Define your terms." 

"Yeeeeah," Steve says, drawing out the word, pulling the beer glass on its coaster a little closer to himself, "I gotta say in my experience, that usually means _no_." 

Clint lets himself smile a little, wryly, and turns the glass around with the tips of his fingers on the rim. "She's not likely to get hurt, or hurt or kill anyone else," he elaborates, "she'll be back in at least a couple days and she'll get over it. Sometimes," he says, as Steve looks up to meet his gaze from where he'd been looking at the crest on the beer glass, "that's as much as anyone's going to get. I'm pretty sure you know that." 

Steve tilts the glass to that, just a bit. "Low bar, though," he notes. 

"You've studied this shit enough to know the CBT mantra," Clint replies, straight-faced. "Start with _little_ goals." 

That gets a snort out of Steve, and then a second half-grin, half-laugh at whatever Steve's thinking as he adds, "Now I'm trying to imagine _you_ at one of those group - " 

"Hey," Clint retorts, "I _led_ one of those once. For a cover. My name was Ben and I had serious anxiety about personal relationships." 

Then he grins, because it honestly looks like Steve's just about hurting himself trying to picture it. 

Clint waits, enjoying the expression, until Steve seems to give up and just says, "Okay, yeah, that'd be a good cover. Why did you _need_ it? Was someone in the therapy group going to end the world or something?" 

As it happens, that particular mission isn't one that's going to make Captain America wear the flinching face of uncomfortable ethical conflict, given that the mark had been a human trafficker living in "Ben"'s building. So Clint kills some time telling the story, and by the time he's finished the owner-server's come out with Clint's ridiculous burger and Steve's steak sandwich plus fries, onion-rings _and_ side-salad. 

Fortunately Steve's big enough that goes by without comment. Granted, he's frankly big enough just about anything would, but still: Clint doubts the lady'd believe that Steve ate probably just about that much food less than two hours ago. 

"How's food going?" Clint asks, since he's thinking about it and it'll put off the story he's probably stuck telling by a few minutes, since he doesn't exactly want to tell it with his mouth full. "Tasha said you were still having some trouble." 

Steve reaches for the salt for the fries and shakes his head slightly. "You know," he replies, "between food and sleep, you asked me a year ago - I would _not_ have expected sleep to be easier to sort out than food. Although apparently we're now Maria Hill's favourite excuse for high calorie cooking experiments." 

"She used to bring baking to work," Clint offers, forcing the tower of his burger to flatten whether it wants to or not. "It was great. Watching the new admin minions trying to reconcile almond-and-cheesecake-brownies with the terrifying spectre and threat of Assistant Director Hill was always fun." 

Steve half-smiles. "I had some trouble picturing her baking, too, right up until I realized I was trying for the wrong picture, and I should just be going for something more like, what's that guy's name, the British chef who goes around yelling at people?" 

"Ramsay," Clint supplies. "Gordon Ramsay. Yells at restaurant owners until they fix their shit." 

"Yeah, him," Steve agrees. "I just needed to picture her like _that_. Then it made perfect sense." 

Clint considers for a bit as he eats, until he says, "Having been in a kitchen or two where she's been cooking, you're not wrong. Except she hisses the swear-words more, instead of yelling. It's like being in a kitchen with an angry cat or some kind of boiling kettle. And you only want to agree to help if you can ignore that. Good food, though. You know she's got some kind of online review blog or something? I never went looking for it but Tasha did." 

"Seriously?" Steve asks and Clint nods, mouth full. 

"Somewhere out there," he says, after he swallows, "there's a whole circle of people who made cooking-friends with some lady on the internet, and they have no idea who they're swapping recipes with. Or having a flamewar over flour brands with, or whatever it is crazy cooking people do." 

" . . . does she have an opinion on flour?" Steve asks, after a second. Clint shakes his head. 

"I pretty much flat refuse to learn that kind of stuff," he says. "Saves time. Trouble too." 

They finish the food, and Clint orders another bourbon while Steve gets a coffee. They're in a small table in a corner, out of the way, and there's actually a speaker between them and the rest of the restaurant; Clint wonders if Steve did that on purpose, or if he just got lucky. Could be either, but in the end he figures the odds around 60-40 luck to intent: even Steve's SHIELD missions were the kind where you still have that space between Mission and Life, and you don't necessarily carry all of the habits over. 

As Steve explains to the hovering server-owner that they're just fine now and are just going to linger over the drinks they've got for a while, thanks, Clint pulls out his phone and texts Natasha: _proof of life?_

It takes less time than he expected; Steve's still stirring a disturbing amount of sugar into his coffee when Natasha texts back with _fuck you barton_ and then _stark's new commercial playing on ESPN_. Clint glances up at the TV and catches the end of it, returns _copy_ and then puts his phone away again. 

Steve's watching him, Clint notices, and he wonders if Steve's gotten good enough to guess what Clint was doing. Doesn't ask about it, though. 

"So," Steve says, breaking the silence, because he's finished stirring the coffee into his sugar. He puts the spoon down on the table. "Long version." 

Well, at least that indicates he's decided he's interested enough to ask. 

Clint leans back into the curve of the chair's back and considers for a beat before he asks, "How much'd you manage to pick up about Tasha's story when you were at SHIELD?" 

Steve shrugs. "What was general knowledge, I guess," he says. Thankfully he goes on without prompting, because fuck knows there were some huge piles of BS that went around, and Clint needs to know if he needs to dispel anything before he gets started. "Picked by the KGB when she was a kid, trained, that part of the KGB went splinter with the fall of Communism, got the kind of famous that scares people and then ended up defecting to SHIELD after you got sent to neutralize her." 

And that's pretty much right. Clint knows the smile-like thing that stretches his mouth is humourless. 

"Kill," he corrects. "The objective of that mission was absolutely to kill the Black Widow, proof of death and all." He lets his eyes run over the bottles behind the bar for a minute, murmurs, "Fuck, where do I start," without really meaning to. 

Steve just puts one extra spoon of sugar in his coffee and waits, fiddling very subtly with the spoon. 

Clint ends up taking the little cardboard coaster and tapping it edgewise on the table for a moment, trying to put things in some kind of order that makes sense. "2003 was a shitty year," is what he settles on. "2001 was the - " Clint gestures sort of out the door and Steve nods. 

"The airplane attacks," he says. "Those towers." And Clint feels a brief impulse to what's maybe a laugh. 

"That must be a bit weird for you," he notes. "Whole world thrown around by something you never even saw actually standing. I mean at least the USSR was a thing before you hit the ice." 

Steve lifts the spoon out of the cup and taps it on the rim. "Honestly, yeah," he admits. "But I get that that's where the new - current - wave of paranoia set in, right? Evil Commie Russians are gone, now - "

"Faceless terrorists," Clint agrees. "2002 was kind of like holding our breath, but 2003 was a fucking shit-show. Darfur - that's the big - "

"The recent genocide in the Sudan," Steve fills in, "yeah," and Clint raises a couple fingers from his cup.

"Darfur blew up, the idiots we were stupid enough to elect invaded Iraq - and trust me," he adds, because no, he's never fucking going to let this one go, "SHIELD knew that was going to go bad the way it did and tried damn hard to stop it." He shakes his head. "What else, SARS - Severe Acute Respiratory System, that started killing people, Chechnya started up, Serbian president fucking got outright assassinated and we'd only had a couple years of not having outright _war_ over there and it looked like Sokovia was gonna boil over any day now, we had the compound bombings in Riyadh, bombings in Morocco, then Indonesia invaded Aceh . . . " 

Clint waves a hand, even though he's not actually done listing everything off, but hell: that should paint the picture. "And that was all before the end of fucking May. SHIELD and the World Security Council were looking at two major wars, who knew what was gonna happen in Indonesia, the shit in Serbia and that was all tangled up with their fucking mafia, a possible major epidemic, the _entire_ fucking international community having six kinds of tantrum at one another, rumours of nuclear shit in North Korea, and it's hard to say whether the rumours were any less dangerous than if they'd actually had a hope in hell of getting any . . . " Clint spreads one hand. "Plus the usual shit that nobody got to know about it because we managed to keep it from making a mess, but a lot of that was juggling and just-barely, a lot more than made anybody happy." 

That year, he remembers, had been the first time he'd _seen_ Phil Coulson on serious stimulants, and it occurs to him to wonder if anyone's _told_ Steve that's why the poor man was acting so fucking weird on the Helicarrier when they met. That normally Coulson did not make a habit of trying to swallow his foot up to the knee and had a much better brain to mouth filter than he'd been displaying, it's just that amphetamines put holes in it. 

Pushes that aside. 

He sits forward, leaning on one arm and drawing the fingertips of the others over the tabletop. "All the projections were, this is just going to get worse. We knew the CIA was operationally a joke and everything they did was just going to inflame any situation they got involved in, we just couldn't stop them; the military was _not_ ready for the shit it was starting to wade in, and you'd never get him to admit it but I will lay money Fury was starting to try and figure out how he could assassinate Cheney and Bush because they were a fucking _disaster_ when it comes to real operations. Oh, and Moscow was fucking around with Chechnya, had been for years, but now it looked like it was going to explode." 

"Sounds fun," Steve says, in a tone of voice that says very clearly that he understands it wasn't, probably better than most people did. Sometimes Clint finds it's important to remember that Steve's war started in _1943_ , and he had at least a year of total shit-show before Normandy meant everyone could send some good news home without lying. 

"Just like a hanging," Clint agrees. "I was only on the edge of it. Deliberately. I shoot things and lie to people," he says, shrugging, "I don't write policy. And _I_ remember it as the most miserable year I can fucking remember. At least the Chitauri and Insight only took a week each, you know?" 

Steve takes a deep breath and says, "Yeah, I do. Everything blows up, but it's started and over, instead of - " he makes a gesture for Clint to pick up again, and Clint nods. 

"Instead of months of grinding 'fuck what's gonna go wrong next'." Clint frowns at his bourbon for a second, trying to get back to where he was. 

"Now," he says, "rewind a bit - few years before all that, SHIELD made note of a new operative being activated on our specialized international checkers board, and the new operative was showy enough that the rest of the so-called intelligence agencies in this country had caught up by the time we hit 2000. First mission we knew of, this operative seduced a particular official in order to get close enough to kill his wife." 

Clint brushes an imaginary speck away from the table beside his glass; this isn't actually something he likes to dwell on, so he says, "You really want the gritty details of what she knew and why anyone cares, I'll tell you later - point is," he pushes on, "it was the kind of hit that's messy, ugly spy shit. The operative'd played at being a secretary, done it really well: completely innocuous, didn't set off anyone's radar, the official _thought_ he was taking advantage of _her_ , gone by the time anyone discovered the body - and I mean _gone_ , no trace." 

Steve's eyebrows go up and he nods, the concentration-frown just about half the lower-level minions at SHIELD had always found so fucking scary and really just means he's paying complete attention starting between his eyebrows. Clint takes a drink. 

"Couple more like that," he says, "some uglier ones, and then plus, there's suddenly a lot of rumours floating through Russian organized crime and the other players - arms' dealers, government backend, bad stuff, about somebody named Drakov. Painting him as _the_ guy to call if you had a particularly sticky problem you needed solved. Cash, favours, trade - you name it, he'd take it, and your problem would disappear, and there'd be no way anyone, from locals to INTERPOL, would even think they could trace it back to you." 

He takes another sip of the bourbon. The problem with this story, he knows - because he's told it before, got to be the lucky fuck to bring the new Assistant Director up to speed about the stuff where the official records were more silences than words - is that it's really fucking hard to keep a kind of disciplined hold on his head. On his imagination. Keep stuff focused on the story he knows, and stop fucking speculating on other . . . stuff.

It does nobody any good for him to try to imagine alias-Drakov's meetings with Bratva and vory and whatever the fuck else. How they went. He comes down on that, on his brain, and says, "Took till 2000 to connect the 'Black Widow' we knew about from the more political end of this stuff to the 'Drakov's daughter' everyone kept talking about cutting through some of the mafia's headaches. The latter," he adds, quietly, "included a lot of families. We're also not actually sure anyone else made the connection, at least who didn't get it from us. The Black Widow looked like a standard operative; this 'Drakov's daughter' didn't. They were pretty good at blending in." 

Steve's still just got the frown of someone listening carefully, so Clint goes on, "Her activities got international after that, and I'm not gonna go through all of them because it's fucking depressing and if you really want to know you can go search the files Stark's hosting on behalf of the world - the point is," he says, putting his hand edgewise on the table, "it more or less culminated in the São Paulo hospital fire, in late 2002. That one took out most of a children's ward and mostly everyone in it."

He keeps his eyes on his drink, speculative and detached: he wouldn't actually blame Steve if he showed some upset there, some shock and horror or even some disgust, but that doesn't mean Clint's not likely to let something slip out of his hands and punch the guy if he _sees_ it, and that just ends nowhere good. "The target was a doctor," he says, "and her staff - they were investigating something that they just thought was a medical mystery, something that would have got a lot of very wealthy people in a lot of deep shit. It all came out later," he adds, "but by then those people'd already covered their tracks enough you couldn't prove shit in court." 

Clint takes a slow breath. "After that, SHIELD got pretty focused at figuring out where this chick and whoever the hell 'Drakov' was in the bargain. Now at the start, that's all the boring espionage scut-work - hundreds of analysts and low-level agents quietly shaking thousands of trees, following leads, just like any other kind of investigation. I wasn't really involved in that, I spent most of that in Peru because Coulson could be a jerk sometimes." 

He doesn't really think about the aside until Steve looks curious; he waves it away, because that's a whole other side-track and it'd take too long. "About the time everything looked like it was going to _shit_ in early 2003," Clint says, instead, "SHIELD got pretty solid intel that she'd be in Moscow on a hit in July, and it got handed over to me to figure out how to find her and kill her." 

"Why you?" Steve asks, but not like he's surprised or anything, or like it needs justification, more like he just wants to see if he's thought of all the rationale, and Clint shrugs. 

"First off, if you need to kill someone as good as we knew the Black Widow was, you want to do it from a distance - what?" he asks, pausing, as Steve suddenly covers his mouth. 

Steve clears his throat, shakes his head and says, "I - Bucky said that, once. About Natasha." 

"Well, he'd know," Clint says, and then goes on, "but most snipers, long-distance killers - most of the best come out of the army or something like it. That's where the training is, it's where the equipment is, it's where you spend however many fucking hours refining the skills. Which means they're great at the shooting part, and they're fantastic if the op _works_ like a military op, and tend to be behind the ball when it comes to playing any other kind of game. I didn't come out of the army." Clint lets himself sort of half-smile. "My trajectory was a little unique, meant I was comfortable operating in situations most of the others were adrift in. Any other agent that could be guaranteed to be good enough make this kind of kill would need a whole strategic team; I just needed a handler." He shrugs. He's never been particularly inclined to false modesty: it gets you killed just about as fast as being an arrogant shit-head, when you're working on the edge. 

When Steve acknowledges that with a little wave, Clint goes on, "Thing is, that kind of thing's basically hunting. It's a lot closer to what cops do than what soldiers do. So you get to know your target first, so _I_ started doing my background shit and . . . " he shakes his head. "It wasn't right. Stuff started to bug me right away. Little stuff, just felt off." 

Clint empties his bourbon, and now that _he's_ mentioned something being off, he notices Steve's listening frown suddenly deepen. Figures Steve finally got around to the numbers. But Clint keeps going. 

"The trick," he says, "is figuring out where you're gonna find your target giving you a shot - ghosts, criminals and assassins? That's a bit harder than national leaders. They don't exactly give press conferences. And like I said: closer to the shit homicide detectives do, police work, so SHIELD got me access to some of the police files, because these were all down as murders. Naturally. Got me into some of the crime-scenes, got crime-scene photos the police took at the time." 

He leans back. His fingers tap on the table. "I got stuck with Sitwell. Was a long op, and pretty isolated, so Coulson had to pass because apparently he had this whole department to run." And yeah, Steve's zeroing in on that ugly little fact of years, Clint thinks, because that little snipe only gets a half-distracted look of amusement for half a blink before the frown comes back. 

"Sitwell was always kind of a fucking nanny as a handler," he says, "but I mostly managed to make him fuck off for the scenes. I'd spread the photos around, in the places where they'd been taken, and . . . something would be off. Stuff like . . . " he shrugs. "Times of death, how they were spaced out. One family the kids and the wife were dead _hours_ before the husband came home and got his throat cut in the doorway - why the hell would a pro do that? And other weird things - other one, the wife's arms were weird, but not like she'd been posed - like she'd been holding someone, one of her kids and then that someone'd been dragged away after rigor set in - except all the kids were dead forty minutes _before_ she was and were still where they'd been killed up in their rooms, and she'd been ambushed in the kitchen. And those kid's'd been tucked back under their covers after they'd been killed. Or the time there'd obviously been a struggle and the living-room was torn to shit, but -" he spreads his hands. "All the family pictures got put back, and the daughter's collection of porcelain dolls tidied up, the broken ones kinda put back together. Broken furniture, the rest of the knick-knacks, the window apparently didn't matter, even though the window was visible from the street, but the pictures and the doll's house? That kind of stuff. Weird shit." 

And Steve's frown is getting deeper and he says, like he can't hold it in anymore, "Look, maybe he . . .was wrong, but when Zola rattled off our birth-dates he said Natasha was born in - " 

"1984?" Clint finishes for him. 

Steve nods, slowly, and now there's some definite tension in his jaw. 

"Yeah," Clint replies, drawling the word a little. "He wasn't wrong. We didn't _know_ that, didn't have any idea who this person was, but as the shit that bugged me piled up I made Sitwell toss this stuff back to HQ and nag them into digging more, to pulling more records, figure out who the hell this person might be, where the fuck she came from instead of just where I was gonna get a shot. Said I wanted earliest photos possible, make it easier to find and ID her no matter how she'd changed hair or makeup because I'd be able to see how age already changed her, but I just wanted . . . something. 

"Then we got lucky." He smiles, humourless. "Some bribes got the going word on what her actual _name_ was, based on shit people heard in meetings with Drakov and so on, and then some trips down the favour-for-favour rabbit-hole got some birth records for one Natalia Romanova, missing person, child, female, red hair. Missing since 1989, born in 1984. Which means they took her operational, playing a grown woman, at fourteen." 

Steve's face goes a kind of blank he's probably getting pretty good at, the blank that says he'd _like_ to have an emotional response to what Clint just said, except the one he wants to have wouldn't be a good idea, so we're just gonna stall here for a few minutes until he finds an acceptable replacement. "That's . . . " he says, eventually, but he stops because that reaction still isn't gonna be a good idea. Clint gives another mirthless smile. 

"Yeah," he agrees. He tilts his glass onto the edge of its base, puts it back down again, shrugs. "I made Sitwell query HQ, which pissed him off. They restated mission parameters, which pissed _me_ off, which pissed _him_ off even more and really our whole relationship just went downhill from there." 

"That why you didn't like him?" Steve asks, with a brief flicker of humour. 

"And I was right," Clint returns, "and he got thrown in front of a speeding truck, both of which will always give me a nice warm glow. Anyway. He tried to insist I continue as laid out, I told him to go fuck himself, hung up and threw my phone in the river." 

He says it pretty lightly, but he looks at the wall over Steve's shoulder, finds a place to rest his eyes for a second while he hauls back on some parts of what he might say if he's not careful. He remembers a lot about how he felt right then, remembers _very_ clearly how angry he'd been, how close that moment had been to him just walking away from SHIELD for good. It was one of the things that drove Sitwell nuts, and now the reasons for that are obvious - the part where SHIELD just happened to be where Clint chose to draw his paycheque, not where he found his vocation. SHIELD'd employed him, for a pretty long time, but SHIELD'd never owned him. That drove Sitwell nuts. 

"See, the thing was," he says, still staring into the middle distance a bit, "once I knew she was a kid? I knew why all that shit wasn't fitting. I knew she was getting into the family's houses by _being a fucking kid_ , lost, running away, just making fucking friends with the other kids, who knew? And that's why the families were always dead first. _I_ knew why she put the pictures back. Why she covered the dead kids' bodies back up and fixed the doll-house and all that shit. That that one woman's arm's were like they were because _she_ lay down and got the corpse to hold her, and that - " 

He opens his hand. Looks at it, turns it over. "I know what fucked up kids look like," he finishes, a little more flatly than he means to, finger hitting the table to beat out emphasis - so he half shrugs and sits up a bit, tries to shake that off. "And I have some pretty strong opinions about people using fucked up kids, and what you do about it and whose responsibility that is. The very least those kind of kids deserve a fucking chance to get out. There's a reason child-soldiers are different from grown men with guns." 

Okay, maybe he doesn't manage to make that any less flat than where it started. 

"Natasha took hers," Steve says, quietly, and Clint tips his glass. 

"I went over Sitwell's fucking head to Coulson. After he finished having an aneurism, we handed Fury a fait accompli: me _and_ Tasha on the tarmac. I told her if she wanted all the way out I'd make it happen, but a lot of the shit she'd done ate at her, she wanted to make up for it, she was eighteen and she'd be nineteen in a couple months so she could legally make the choice, she'd never lived as anything other than an operative . . . civillian life didn't actually appeal that much," Clint says. "So she stayed with SHIELD, so did I." 

He slides the bourbon glass over to the side of the table, into the universal position of _hey waiter I'm done bring me something else_. "And I told Fury if he fucked her around I'd put a bullet in his head." He pauses a second and adds, "To be fair, he didn't really need telling," because he feels like he should clarify that. "Untouchable stone-cold bastard front aside, it was pretty obvious he was relieved, and it's not like he's the kind of person who makes a habit out of taking advantage of people in her kind of situation. But it was also pretty clear _she_ was gonna bond pretty close to whoever was in charge, because that's what happens. People get used to following, obeying one person and get away, they look for someone else to fill the space." 

Clint glances over the rest of the restaurant, watches out of the corner of his eye as Steve looks down and fiddles with his mug the way you do when something clips you a bit. "So I just wanted to be really clear about the whole thing," Clint finishes. "So we didn't have any misunderstandings later." 

Steve's still looking at his coffee. He clears his throat and starts, "So today's - " but Clint interrupts him. 

"Nhn," he says, holding up one finger, wryly amused. "Long version's not done yet. We just need refills." 

 

It takes a minute to catch the owner-server's eye and get more coffee - two cups, this time, because while he needed the drink Clint's not really that interested in getting _drunk_ , as such. He watches Steve spoon just as much sugar as before, and shakes his head. When Steve gives him a quizzical look, Clint makes a slight gesture at the sugar and says, "I guess that's one way to get extra calories." 

"Everybody's got bad habits," Steve replies blandly. 

"True," Clint acknowledges, and then sits back again. "Things went more or less fine for about four years," he says. "I mean, Personnel learned that giving Natasha psych evals was as pointless as giving them to me, because she'd figured out what the 'right' answers were; I almost got killed in Somalia and Tasha secured her reputation as the scariest person in SHIELD by point blank executing someone over that but since the fucker was criminally incompetent _and_ basically responsible for everything going to shit nobody really objected, that kind of thing: but still." He gives Steve a basically sincere look. "More or less fine."

Steve puts a hand to his face, laughing softly, and says, "The sad part is, I know exactly what you mean. We almost died on a daily basis," he sort of mimics, "but _other than that_ , everything was basically fine and working." He pauses, grimaces slightly and then says. "Sort of. For a given value of fine." 

"Forty-three through forty-five?" Clint hazards, amused. 

"Pretty much," Steve sighs, and then waves one hand. "Go on," he says, "I'm pretty sure you're working up to everything going to hell somehow." 

"On a speeding fucking train," Clint replies. His hands move absently: turning the coffee mug, finger tapping on the spoon, brushing sugar granules off as he talks. "We had a couple of attempts at getting Tasha," he says. "They were credible, but not that much of a cause for concern. It'd been four years, even she was pretty sure her former people had given her up as a lost cause." 

"Not so much," Steve guesses, and Clint shakes his head. 

"'Drakov' was an alias, but it'll do for now - he was her handler," Clint explains. "Which in this pit meant she'd been handed over at around thirteen, spent a year in advanced training, graduated and hadn't seen anyone from the program or had anyone else in her life except marks since then. These assholes'd code name'd been designated _the Red Room_ back under the KGB, they kept it when they went rogue. Theoretically their endgame was restoring the glory of Stalin's Russia, but I think they honestly just got off on being a big player in the field, being the thumb on the scales behind the scenes without ever going official. And they just kept the story because it was a good one to feed to the girls to make everything make sense. Give them a purpose and a cause." 

Steve's mouth twists, just a touch; that hit something, and Clint kind of wonders what it is, but doesn't ask. "Yeah," Steve says, and his voice just tells Clint he's right, "a lot of things work better if you can make it a cause." 

"Drakov had a _lot_ of pull in what passed for the chain of command," Clint says, after a beat, getting on with it. "He was also a sleazy power-hungry piece of shit, and beyond that Nat was their golden girl, their show piece." He shrugs. "I mean, Tasha knew she was good, but part of the conditioning was designed to make her think of herself as one of a possible many, replaceable if she had to be, all part of the unstoppable righteous machine. They told the girls a lot of shit that wasn't true, and yeah, 'girls'," Clint notes, "because yeah, there were more of them. Thirteen per cohort, I think, not sure how many cohorts. Reasonable rate of attrition, like there always is in this shit. Attrition in training, attrition in the field, ended up . . . " he tries to remember, "maybe around thirty all together. Something like that. And like I said, hard to tell how much of the ideology they fed the girls they actually believed and how much of it they just kept because it sounded good." 

Steve doesn't say anything. Clint stares at his coffee for a minute before he takes a drink. 

"Turned out she was worth enough for them to just take those four years to set the trap," he says, flatly. "They managed to get someone pretty fucking deep into SHIELD, too. Tasha was on a routine solo in Berlin and she fell off the face of the earth." He pauses, takes another drink and then says, "You ever meet Melinda May?" 

"No," Steve says, quietly. "Heard a lot about her, but kept missing each other." 

"Too bad," Clint says, and means it. Wonders for a second how Hong Kong is going. "By the end of the first day we'd confirmed Tasha was missing, May'd ripped through SHIELD and found the mole, and it was another one of the Red Room girls. Now, _she_ might've just as well been a granite rock and it was pretty fucking clear she'd go to the grave in pieces with her mouth still shut but her handler - " Clint exhales and tries to keep his lip from curling. " _He_ had a strong sense of self-interest and self-preservation, and a flexible backbone, and he sold the whole thing for a promise of Federal prison under an alias. Told us lots of stuff we didn't know, because Tasha didn't know it - exactly who the fuck these people were, where they came from, what they wanted. Filled in the gaps. And filled in what they did this time and why." 

Clint turns his mug again, staring at the way the reflection changes, keeping the memories attached to the story at arm's length. "They were betting on us not being able to find them," he says, evenly. "Beyond that, they were willing to gamble on whether or not SHIELD or even the Council would come to the conclusion expending the resources was worth it. A lot of assets - sorry," he stops, because the word get a ghost of a flinch out of Steve and Clint knows why, it just slipped his mind. He takes in the restaurant again and amends it to, "A lot of resources to move and spend, over one operative whose allegiances might be compromised anyway. They were willing to bet that's the side SHIELD would come down on." 

He looks up at Steve and says, "I didn't actually fucking wait to see what they were going to decide, mind you. I worked on the assumption they'd make the right choice, and once I was in play they had the choice of backing me up or watching me carve through most of their European network and make hash of the entire theatre, so that made everything a lot easier for them. Because firstly I didn't give a shit, and secondly it'd've be awkward if someone made a stupid decision I'd've had to kill them for later." 

And Clint wouldn't normally bank on Steve catching the times when Clint isn't being the slightest fucking bit hyperbolic about that kind of thing, but this time he's pretty sure Steve does; Steve also says, matter-of-factly, "I figured something like that. How did you find - ?" 

"I had contacts SHIELD didn't," Clint replies. "I had a whole life doing this shit before SHIELD - not a great life, but the kind that means you know people who know people and even secret underground lairs in fucked up areas just outside of Moscow need things like electricity, running water, food orders. Some people owed me favours, some people decided they really liked living and wanted to keep on doing it, some people decided they liked money enough to find reasons for us to give them some. Took us two weeks, but we found them. And it was a fucking mess." 

Steve doesn't say anything, just waits. Clint downs half of the coffee that's left. His hand goes to the back of his head, unconscious, because his body just about always remembers his skull hitting the concrete when he thinks about this stuff. "Almost failed," he says, shortly. "Entire mission. People died. In the end I had bullets in my leg and a lucky through-and-through here," and he touches the left side of his stomach, "by which I mean lucky it didn't rip through anything that wouldn't heal, and our friend alias-Drakov almost shot me in the head. Stopped to talk, though. Never," he adds, looking right at Steve, "stop to talk." 

"Never really did," Steve replies. "Gives people time to aim." 

"Exactly," Clint says. "But Drakov had some personality issues, and he really didn't like me, and he seemed to really need me to know that before he shot me." Clint leans on the table, looks down at the spoon and the little space of coffee at the bottom of its bowl. 

"We were in the hallway outside the medical containment cells," he says. "Tasha came out of the door behind him; he didn't expect it. Found out later he thought she was sedated. Just wasn't enough, turns out, so she came to. She'd killed the guard inside and taken his gun and she came out. And she might not've been _sedated_ anymore," he adds, "but she was definitely fighting through drugs to think. And he . . . started talking to her. All kinds of stuff - lies," Clint clarifies, "but comforting stuff, about how she was safe and home and he loved her - yeah," Clint pauses, looking up at Steve and catching the unhappy look. "I know. But that's what he used. Asking if she remembered shit like birthdays, presents, holidays, their house, her mother - which is fucking rich," he adds, wry, "because the graduation test for these girls was killing their moms - being handed the profile of a threat and it turning out to be them. Proved their total loyalty to the program." 

He avoids looking at Steve's face. "He was basically ignoring me but I wasn't in much shape to take advantage of that. I didn't say anything, either," he says, "because fucked if I could figure out what _to_ say, up against that - I was losing blood, I hurt a lot, I kind of had a concussion . . . " He shrugs. "Not great for eloquence." 

Absently, he reaches out and taps the spoon, watches how the coffee doesn't move. "She looked at him," he says, "and me, and him, back and forth for a bit, and when he asked her for the gun she looked like she was about to hold it out, to hand it over. Except she shot him instead."

Clint has to stop for a second. Take a drink of coffee. He knows, kind of distantly, that he's probably saying more than he thought he was going to, but it would be . . . easy, too easy, for just about anyone to . . . get this wrong. And given how Tasha seems to have decided the guy's that important, it's kind of essential that Steve doesn't. 

"Twice in the chest, once in the face," he goes on when he puts the , and taps out the pattern on the table with one finger, only half-conscious of it. "One two three, and then while he fell she emptied the rest of the clip into him, centre of mass. Considering the range and the calibre," Clint notes, "the head-shot definitely spread enough of his brain on the wall behind him to do the trick, but given the rest of it he was very, very definitely dead. And _that_ ," he sighs, "was today, 2007." 

Steve looks at his coffee, takes a drink in lieu of the thing he obviously can't think of to say. 

"He looked pretty surprised," Clint notes, remembering. "See, the thing is, when someone's had the chance to fuck with you, control you that much for that long - especially starting as a kid . . . " He sighs. "Humans are built to survive. Sometimes that goes fucked up but most of the time it doesn't. The more power someone's got over you, the more keeping them happy with you's likely to keep you alive - and that gets a lot easier the more you love them. The more you see the world the way they see it, the more them _being_ happy makes you happy. The Red Room had her since she turned five years old, and then that bastard basically _became_ the embodiment of the Red Room and the only real thing in her world from the age of thirteen until she walked away, and that's who she shot today, nine years ago." 

He looks at Steve and actually for a minute he's not sure what's going on behind Steve's not-quite-blank face - something, for sure, something that's spinning gears in his head, but Clint doesn't feel like he could say exactly why. 

Figuring he might as well, Clint goes on, "She was there for two weeks; they had her drugged up and messed up enough she thought she'd been there for three days. Despite using them like a nest, our holdover-Nazi friends never shared their mind-rewriting tech with the Soviets - " 

"Wouldn't've done them any good," Steve interrupts, distantly. It feels reflexive, and Clint stops, gives Steve a questioning look; Steve shakes his head like _he's_ shaking something off and says, "Ah, the neural trauma . . . " he shakes his head. "Use it on someone not enhanced the way me and Bucky are, you've got a brain injury and no new long-term memories the first time you do it, and a vegetable the next. S'why we didn't have to deal with a whole army of . . . " he stops and waves it away. "You need the brain to be able to repair itself way, way faster than normal human brains do, and to be able to take more trauma before real damage in the first place. For us it can sever the . . . I don't know, connections, that let us access memories, with minimal extra damage. For normal humans it just fries huge parts of the brain. It's useless."

Thank god for small favours, Clint _doesn't_ say aloud, because while that whole litany actually made Steve seem calmer Clint's still pretty sure he's not thankful for much about the whole fucking mess; instead Clint says, "Yeah, well. So they didn't have that, but turns out? You can do a lot with drugs, altered states of perception and just beating shit into people's heads over and over again. Which is what they were trying to do with Nat. So," he says, on an exhale, "on top of everything else if it wasn't in a SHIELD record, didn't have someone around to see it or she didn't tell me or someone else about it before, she can't be a hundred percent certain of anything that happened pre-2007. Summer of. That part you should probably know - it's not a never-touch-this kind of thing, but if she's vague about something that falls under that, it's better not to push." 

He shrugs, because that's just about it. "This year just sucks more because - " he shakes his head. "Shit with Fury; last year everything was enough of a mess that a bit more didn't even make a ripple, this year stuff's better so . . . it shows. Hey, here, you feel better enough to really feel like shit about this now, you know?" 

"Yeah," Steve says, with feeling, "I know that dance." This time the frown on his face is one Clint hasn't actually seen before, softer around the edges and worried. Young, almost. Well. Same age he actually is, maybe. "Will she be okay?" Steve tries for a smile and sort of fails as he adds, "For a reasonable value of okay." 

Clint tries to figure out how to answer that question without sounding flip, dismissive, any fucking thing like that and without lying: Nat's been in and out of nagging Steve about making his life better for four years now, one way or another, and that kind of thing does matter, make a difference. "Tasha decided to figure out how to be okay a long time ago," he says, in the end. "So she will be." 

Steve nods, like he actually understands that. Hell, maybe he does. He nods, and then his face goes a little knowing itself, and a little something else as he says, completely sincerely, "Are _you_ okay?" 

It's enough to make Clint laugh, out loud and abrupt. "How many times does Wilson hit you with that?" he asks, and Steve shrugs, half-smiling. 

"A lot," he admits. 

Clint's about to find something else to say - possibly even pointing out that, _even_ given everything he just told the guy, his entire reaction to Steve and everything on his plate is still _oh thank fuck that's not me, it's never been that bad_ \- but the server-owner who's been standing over to the side being hesitant for the last two minutes comes over and asks them if they'd like to be "taste testers" for the restaurant's "new dessert" and Clint figures that's as good a way to let this close as any. 

 

Steve pays cash, and steps outside to get out of the way; Clint uses a card, up at the bar, and then notices the square shape of a cigarette packet in the bartender's shirt pocket and completely loses the battle over whether or not to ask the guy to spot him a smoke. 

The bartender's a nice guy and spots him three and throws in a pack of matches. Clint lights one as soon as he steps outside. 

"You didn't see me do this," he says, and Steve looks amused, "and you're definitely not going to tell anyone we mutually know." 

"Gonna spend the next two months regretting it?" Steve asks, and it's a fair question. 

"Probably," Clint admits. He blows out a stream of smoke. "But right now, I don't regret it at all. Just wait," he adds, to Steve's half-smile and shaking head. "Next month I have to make myself quit coffee again." 

"Why coffee?" Steve asks, "and why next month?" 

"Next month," Clint replies, "because there aren't that many days left in this one; coffee, because I was an idiot and started drinking it again and an addiction to stimulants is a really fucking bad idea if you want to guarantee steady hands. I haven't needed to shoot anyone for a while but I'm not comfortable relying on that state of affairs anymore." 

He grins when Steve laughs. "Fair," Steve says. "Heading back to the Tower?" 

"Might as well," Clint says. And that's true. 

After he's said good-bye and gone a few blocks, though, he passes on the bartender's generosity to a homeless guy sitting on the street corner, who blesses him excessively. He's going to regret one smoke enough. He doesn't really need the other two.


	2. confession

It's one of those mornings where Steve talks him out of leaving, out of running. And has to talk him _into_ eating. And Bucky lets him, sort of, but then it's one of those fucking days where he's twitchy and agitated and can't actually fucking handle . . . well, can't handle _much_ fucking touching him, to be honest, which is why he's in a fucking tank-top again and then twitchy (just not as much) the other direction because he fucking feels undressed. And he feels bad that he wants it this warm in here. 

One of those fucking days. These fucking days. There are a lot of these fucking days. 

And it's not like Bucky feels like he's teetering on the edge of something, like he's about to fall, it's just like . . . like the fucking tape keeps getting caught and so the whole reel the reel jerks from second to second, missing bits in between. Like the whole fucking world is stuttering. Not a lot. Just enough to make everything . . . off. 

It means he can't decide if Romanova nixing lunch with Steve is good, because it means Steve stays home at least a couple more hours and (Bucky'll admit to this to _himself_ , anyway) that makes the agitation a bit less, that Steve's where he can see him even if he can't fucking stand to be touched - or if it's bad because it means Steve stays home at least a couple more hours and his worry feels like steel scraping down a fucking chalkboard inside Bucky's God-damned _head_. 

That just reverses, when Steve does go out. 

Bucky _tells_ him to go. Loudly. Because Steve's been unsettled and unhappy all fucking day so far and since either way is just trading up on which _part_ 's dragging hot wires across Bucky's nerves and not how _much_ , Steve might as well go fucking figure out if having a second lunch and a drink with someone (Barton? maybe? the "who" doesn't really stick in his head) might make _him_ feel better. 

_One of them_ might as well not be a hateful jerk. 

When Steve's out the door and the door's closed and bolted again, Bucky stops even pretending to bother with something to fill the time. He has been - fucking around jumping from book to youtube to fucking around with pictures to the stupid matching line games he's got too fucking many of - because not doing it makes Steve worry more and he couldn't handle it; now he stops and gives up. 

Just drops himself on his back on the flattened futon, waits for the stupid cat to figure out where she wants to settle, and then stares at the ceiling until his eyes don't want to be open anymore and closes them. Not that he's going to fucking sleep, or anything. He's just tired of looking at the whole fucking world, any part of it. 

The window's open a bit for air and he should close it, because it's starting to get colder than he wants in here, but now that he's here finding the motivation to move is like trying to tow a car with a ball of fucking twine. Complete with the recoil every time it snaps. So he stops that, too. 

His phone's in his back pocket; it buzzes twice for texts while he lies there and half listens to voices and cars and crow-calls outside, footsteps and doors opening and closing in the building and the murmur of voices there, too. He ignores the buzzes for a bit. 

For a while, actually.

Until some _fucking idiot_ outside starts their car with the stereo up way too fucking loud, playing a song that for some God- _fucking_ -forsaken reason decided to sample the sound of some automatic fucking _gunfire_ right in the middle. 

A voice that belongs to one of the women in the building next door snaps _Jesus Christ will you turn that down_ before Bucky's wound far enough back down to get up and snarl out of the window without killing someone. And whoever the idiot is does turn it down, a little, and then the car and its fucking stereo are driving away, so it's gone. And so is the kind of quiet he'd managed to get to, lying here. 

Fuck. 

On the basis that he'd startled the kitten onto the floor (where she's still standing tensed with her ears back), and he's fucking three quarters of the way up anyway, Bucky swears under his breath and gets up to make a pot of coffee and drop the little twit a treat so she'll calm down. 

Pulls the phone out more out of habit than anything else, once he's got the water on the stove. 

He ignores the one from Steve telling him to eat, for now; opens it so it'll say he read it so Steve knows he's not fucking dead or anything, but otherwise ignores it. He frowns at the other one - the one from the kid that says, _why's not-agent-anymore romanoff on the roof?_

It's not exactly a complicated question but it still takes a minute for him to even fucking parse the words, and then all he can think is _your guess is as good as mine, kitten_. Well, that and _Romanova what the_ fuck _do_ you _want_ , but it's not really all of a thought. That one's just sort of a feeling, all in one push. 

Mercedes sent the text a little more than an hour ago, so when Bucky replies, _no idea_ , he adds, _still there?_

The kid sends back, _was when I came in 20 mins ago_ with a suspicious-expression emoji-thing attached. The kitten jumps up on the counter and head-butts Bucky's arm with a small noise of complaint, so he strokes her head absently while he says, _don't worry about it, I can throw her out the window if I have to_. 

Then, because he's got better things to do than figure out what's going on in Romanova's labyrinthine little mind, flips the recipient window and sends _are you going to sit on the roof all night or what?_ because why fucking waste time on being subtle?

The "night" part's a stretch, maybe - it's only quarter to five - but who the fuck cares. 

Romanova's answer takes a bit. Bucky has time to pour coffee, kick the futon to recline instead of flat and drop onto it for a couple of minutes before _she_ drops onto the balcony. The deliberate noise of her feet hitting the boards more or less stands in for a knock: when she straightens up she stands where she is, arms folded and face expressionless. 

Bucky looks her over for a second. At first because he's making a point, but then because - she doesn't actually look _good_. She's in some suede (or at least suede-looking) low heels with jeans that he's pretty sure are longer than you're supposed to wear with those kind of shoes, a t-shirt that looks wrong for the jeans (he's not sure why, because the rules of fashion are not that fucking interesting anymore, but he knows what he sees and he can find the patterns), and a leather jacket thrown over top; her hair's yanked back in a clip, and she's got a purse that doesn't match the jacket on her shoulder. 

Not that any of this makes her look bad, because he's pretty sure it's flat out impossible to make Natalia Romanova look _bad_ , at least without prosthetics and some pretty intense film-worthy makeup, but she looks mismatched, badly thrown together like Bucky's pretty sure she never normally would, bar for a cover. 

When he does get up and open the door for her, she also smells like cigarettes. 

"How?" she demands, flatly and in Russian. He's tempted to tell her he heard her, even though they both know that's not true (there's too much attic space and insulation between the condo's ceiling and the roof to hear someone like her up there, and he doesn't really need to so he hasn't bothered to do anything to change that), but mostly just because he's tempted to be an asshole, period, so he skips it in favour of the truth.

"Kid was messing around up there practicing," he replies instead, matching language and stepping back so she can come in. "Like she does." It's an inference, granted, but there's not a lot of other ways or reasons for Mercedes to be up there that wouldn't catch Romanova's attention. 

He goes back to sprawl on the futon again, trying to find some way to make what feels like every muscle still attached to what's left of his fucking collar-bone stop screaming at him. 

"I saw her," Romanova allows. Like she's turning over the explanation and examining it to see if she'll take it as-is. 

She steps past the door and then closes it behind her, kicks her shoes off. At the noise they make, the idiot kitten bleats from the kitchen and then skitters over the floor to jump up beside Bucky and then settle on his chest. 

"She's suspicious and territorial," Bucky says, "and as far as you go she's trying not to act like a swooning groupie so you get extra suspicion to compensate." 

Romanova hasn't been here before without Steve around, and plus for some reason she's wound up like a spring. Her not-so-quick scan over the kitchen and the dining room like there might be something to read with a look (something she hasn't seen before, in a lot more detail) is probably reflex, given that. Eventually, she walks over to the tap and pours herself a glass of water. 

She tilts her head at him, when she turns back. "What's she usually compensating for?" 

"If you thought she was usually compensating for something, you wouldn't've been surprised she told me you were here," Bucky points out. Romanova shrugs. She makes her way across the living-room to sit on the couch. 

"That was five minutes ago," she retorts. "New data provokes a review." 

Then she stops and scrubs her hands over her face. "Sorry," she says quietly. It's in English. Bucky feels his shoulders let go, realizes he hadn't really felt them tense up. He could really do without his body doing things of its own fucking accord. 

Not that that's going to stop it. 

She pulls the clip out of her hair and rakes her fingers through tangles that catch at them. "Do you guys have any tea?" she asks, still in English, sounding like she's at least trying for normal. "Even fucking herbal tea, right now, I don't really - " 

Bucky jerks his head at the kitchen. "Think Wilson left some in the cupboard second to the left of the sink," he says. "Dried leaf shit you put in boiling water, anyway. Might be tea." 

"Thanks," she says, and gets up again, this time only clipping half her hair back from her face. 

He listens to the faint noises of her finding the electric kettle, scooping something that rattled like dried leaves into something that sounded like glass, so it was probably the pot from the coffee-maker. Finding a mug, milk or cream, the sugar. Once the water's boiled she lets it sit on the (probably) tea-leaves for almost ten minutes before she pours, stirs, and comes back into the living-room with the spoon still rattling just barely against the rim of the mug. 

Outside she'd looked blank and the kind of expressionlessness that's the same as slamming a door in someone's face. Now she just looks tired and tense, and Bucky considers her for a second before he says, "That bad, huh," still in English, because he's not actually sure what the fuck she's doing here and that's enough to prickle over his skin and make him edgy. Edgier. 

She puts her tea on the side-table, tucks her feet up beside her and leans her elbow against the arm of the couch, her head on her hand. _Really_ tired, Bucky amends, and really tense.

"It'd take about fourteen fucking years of history to explain why," she says, "and I'm not up to it, but yeah, that bad." 

The kitten pads her way along the back of the futon towards the cat-tree in the corner made by futon and couch; Bucky watches her. She gets caught between being curious as fuck and being a complete chicken-shit sometimes, and he thinks this is one of them: she wants to get close enough to sniff at the human, but the human makes her nervous.

"You smell like an ashtray," he notes, and Romanova laughs. It's a bit ragged. 

She puts her feet on the ground, elbows on her knees and face in her hands for a minute again, before letting her forearms drop one across the other. "I spent this morning trying to be someone else," she says. 

And since it's so obvious he's supposed to, Bucky asks, "Did it help?" a bit wryly, and she shakes her head, reaching behind to pick up her tea and bring it in front of her, holding it in both hands. 

"No," she says. And asks, "Where's Steve?" obviously not wanting to follow that line anymore.

Bucky shrugs, watches the kitten bounce herself up to the top of the little box-house at the top of the cat-tree. "Out," he says. 

She gives him a sidelong look; when she says, "Just 'out'?" there's . . . something, something in the tone that puts his back up again, puts him on edge. He's not sure why, not sure what he thinks she's suggesting, and when she looks at him again and her face changes and she shakes her head, he's still not sure what the fuck is going on. Or why she says, "Sorry. I didn't mean that." 

But it lessens the edge. And he doesn't want . . . actually, he _does_ want to kick her out, but he doesn't want to _have kicked_ her out, and if that's nonsensical bullshit well. Welcome to his life. In the end, he says, "Might be with your sniper," just to put something in the silence. 

Her smile's the kind that women get when they want anyone they're talking to not to look too hard at some aspect or facet of the next thing they're going to say; Romanova starts with, "I don't think - " and it's like watching her pull on a mask made from someone else's skin and it gets under his more than he can take right now. 

He cuts her off with, "You try on that bullshit here, Black Widow, you can leave," and it stops her. 

He doesn't know what bullshit, exactly. He doesn't _care_. Whatever it was, he could see it, and she can get rid of it or he can get rid of her. 

Her face goes blank for a minute and then she exhales slowly and sits back, tea still in both hands. 

"That's probably fair," she says, distantly. She looks at the ceiling for a moment and then closes her eyes. Digs her thumb-knuckle into the curve of one eye-socket, just over from the bridge of her nose. "I shot someone for him, today," she says, in Russian again. "Not today-today, I mean, years ago. A little bit for me, but - " her thumb presses along the rim of the mug, just enough to make a faint noise. "Mostly for him. Barton. If I didn't, he would die. So I did. Shot someone, killed someone." 

Bucky doesn't have an answer for that. Not even sure he has the space to think about it. But it stays there anyway. 

She stares through her mug. "I loved that person," she goes on. Now she scrapes her fingernail along the rim of the cup, back and forth. "Very much - longer, more . . . " she trails off, lets the rest of that breath go. "I can forget about it most of the year. Not today. Today years ago I killed the person I loved most in the world to save Clint Barton's life." 

She keeps staring through the mug, but her mouth makes the shape of a smile while her eyes stay blank. "I killed that person for him - so does that make him mine, or me his?" 

Now she looks up, eyes focusing. And part of Bucky wants to tell her to leave, and part of him just wants to laugh, and the part that heaves itself up into his head and his mouth to answer comes trailing razor-wire and sharp broken edges and probably shouldn't be allowed to fucking talk to anyone, ever, let alone someone clearly having a bad day, but it's not like he gets to have a handle on shit, ever, so because of that part crawling up into his mouth he asks, "He ask you to?" 

Natalia blinks at him. Like this time she has to take a minute to understand the question. In the end, she shakes her head. 

Bucky shrugs, and it hurts. "He's yours." 

" . . . how's that one work?" Natalia asks, dry and dropping into English like she's pulling a blind down a window. "Because first look, I'm inclined to call bullshit." 

"The question's bullshit," Bucky retorts, following the language. "Inasmuch as there's any part where it's not, he didn't _ask_ you, sure as fuck didn't tell you. _You_ decided Barton's life was worth more to you than that someone else's. _Your_ choice, not his. Makes it pretty fucking straightforward really." 

And there's something in his head twisting that says he's going to fucking regret this, some thread's got caught on something he can't see yet and it's going to . . . something. Cut him, rip something, break something, if he looks at it too close. The razor-wire's going to catch in skin and it's going to be his and it's going to fucking hurt. The words aren't wrong, the thought isn't, it's not a lie, he can't take it back, but behind there's something, and the something, it blooms out into his head - something he didn't, that he did not want to go here, and he should have kept his mouth shut - 

Natalia frowns. Her gaze turns inwards, she turns inwards, pulls herself inside and stays there for a while while the shadow of the thing unfolds in his head and they don't say anything - until it looks like she comes back to the room and the frown turns outward, thoughtful, considering and turns all that at him and she starts to say, "Where do we end with that with - " 

" _Don't,_ " he says. Snarls. It's flat, harsh enough to startle _him_ , and Natalia stops. Closes her mouth.

The kitten's head turns towards him and she makes a noise, and Bucky makes his left hand open again. "We _don't_ ," he says, trying for more normal. "We don't end anywhere." 

And Natalia slowly nods her head. She still looks thoughtful, like she's making sense of something, and now the tightness in his jaw makes his head ache. And he asks, in Russian, "Why are you _here_?"

She almost answers, and then stops, and maybe that's why he doesn't throw her out right there: because she stops and swallows, and looks at the ceiling, like she's trying to think of how to say something hard, and when she answers her voice is one step away from sing-song. The kind of sing-song you use when you hate what you have to say. 

"Because I've spent most of the whole fucking day feeling eighteen," she says, in English. "It hasn't been great. Eighteen wasn't my favourite year. I thought I was letting habit take me around pointlessly checking that everyone that . . . mattered is alive, but I stalled here, didn't move on, because I felt . . . less eighteen. I don't know why. That's what happened." 

She takes a swallow of her tea and then says, "I can go." 

It's not even a conscious _thought_ , he just does it: he throws a pillow at her, hard, aiming for her head, one of the two throw pillows that were in reach. She manages to catch it without spilling, barely, and gives him a look that can't pick between startled, confused and outraged. 

"Romanova," he says flatly, "there is no fucking way in _Hell_ that you _don't_ know that after you fucking tell me _that_ , I'm not going to throw you out. Don't even fucking pretend there is. Do not _fucking_ try to pretend there's any fucking world where _you_ don't already fucking know that." 

She blinks. She gives a sudden burst of laughter, the kind that's more about being startled than something being funny. She puts the pillow and the tea down and covers her face. 

"Okay," she says, "yeah. You're right. But I promise I wasn't thinking about that when I said it." 

"I might believe that," Bucky allows, grudgingly. And mostly to leave that behind he adds, "Why the fuck were you smoking, anyway?" 

"I don't even know," Natalia admits. Takes the redirect. And, he notes, stays. "Nicotine does nothing for me to start with." 

At his look she elaborates, "Apparently you need receptors for it, most people have them dormant until they start smoking, some people don't have them at all." She gestures to herself. "So it's actually completely pointless. But actually the shoes were stupider." She extends one leg, and he can see where the shoes have ripped the shit out of her feet. 

"Nice job," he says. She makes a gesture at a mocking curtsey. 

Then she gestures to the TV. "If you're not throwing me out, can I put something on?" 

And if he can't for the life of him fucking think what he'd want on, that's what they have the top shelf _for_ and having something to keep them from accidentally fucking talking anymore is probably a good idea. He waves at it. "Anything off there." 

She gets up and the kitten backs away from her, jumps back down to the futon and comes over to drape herself longways over his ribcage. Natalia frowns at the DVDs and then pulls one down. " _Nightmare on Elm Street_ ," she says, holding it flat to show the front of the box. "Really." 

Bucky gestures at the shelf and shrugs. She gives the box a disbelieving look for a few more seconds, and then crosses over to the machines. 

"I've never seen it," she says, when she catches his look. "It looked too - " 

"It's fucking ridiculous," Bucky tells her. "That's the point." 

 

She leaves before the sun finishes setting. By the time she leaves, the idiot kitten's managed to sniff at her hair twice and her finger once, and tentatively decided she's furniture instead of a kitten-eating monster. 

Then she's gone, and he needs not to be here, and Steve's not here to talk him out of leaving, this time.


	3. communion

When Steve gets home, Bucky's not there. 

There's also a mug with faint lipstick marks on the rim, one of the big pillows is pulled up on the couch, the _Nightmare on Elm Street_ case is on the floor in front of the TV, there's tea-leaves floating in a last inch of tea in the pot that goes with the coffee-maker, and a pan that looks like it got used to make scrambled eggs in the sink. With two plates on the counter. 

Steve goes back out into the living-room and picks up the mug, and Bucky's coffee mug from the arm of the futon, and puts both on the counter with the plates. He looks at the dishes and the tea. 

There's only one _possible_ explanation for that, however improbable it feels, and after a minute he pulls out his phone and texts Clint with, _fyi apparently Natasha was here for at least a while_. 

All he gets back is _...huh._ And honestly that's all he's got, too, and Clint's probably told him enough of Natasha's secrets for today, so Steve lets it go and puts his phone back in his pocket. 

Down at his ankle, Abrikoska complains about it being past sunset and her bowl not being full. So he fills it, and because he might as well he changes her water, cleans the cat-box while he's at it and goes to find the tablet. 

It's in the bedroom, and Steve ends up sitting on the bed instead of going back to the living-room. He feels heavy, tired: he's done this enough times by now to recognize what it feels like when there's more . . . _stuff_ in his head than he's actually gone through and sorted out yet, sorted into its places, so that it's like weight he's still dragging around. It's not really a surprise or anything: he's not sure what he expected when he asked, what he'd prepared himself for, but it clearly hadn't been . . . that. What Clint told him. Not all of it, anyway. 

And there's stuff in his head that was already there that gets pulled out and moved around - like he remembers Natasha sitting on the bed at Sam's, staring at the comforter and saying _I thought I was going straight_. 

Like he remembers how under the dam, she didn't say anything. Not once. And it'd gone by him as nothing more than an annoyance, impatient, and that just about irrelevant over the way everything in his head burned, but now in hindsight he can think about what it must've meant to Natasha when Fury said _I didn't know who to trust._

No wonder she'd needed to be out of the country for a while to get her head straight. 

After he's been sitting on the bed a few minutes Abrikoska comes into the room and jumps up beside him, and meows at him sharply a couple times, tail straight up and vibrating. 

"Sorry, kiddo," he says, reaching over to scratch just in front of her tail. "Can't really help you this time. What you see is what you get. Well," he amends, "smell, I guess, in your case."

To his surprise, after standing there for a second and making a couple of the little half-complaining noises she's got that almost sound like pigeon-coos, she pads over and settles down beside him, tucking her feet under her and settling into a loaf. Steve blinks at her a few times and then strokes her head and down her spine. 

"So I'm better than nothing now, am I?" he says, and she squeezes her eyes shut at him. "Well at least it means you're quiet." 

He reads for a bit, but it mostly falls flat; it mostly falls flat, he knows, because even beyond the stuff he hasn't got sorted out, he's trying to distract himself from thinking about things that aren't really wholly formed _thoughts_ , just shapes and feelings. That aren't even what Clint said, told Steve, not really - they're things that grow from that, jump off, go out from it.

They mostly don't go anywhere good, he knows that: there's no resolution, it's just all . . .stuff he either has to wait out or get used to and right now he feels overloaded as it is. 

And then maybe a couple things, or maybe one, like a heavy artillery shell on a deep mattress, pulling everything towards it while it sinks. 

Means reading's a bit of a lost cause, in the end. 

Eventually he gives up and puts the tablet down on his stomach. He absently strokes the cat beside him a few times, lets the thoughts sit there, and the images of a woman with red hair emptying her gun into a body that was dead before it hit the ground. 

He's glad he didn't know before. Didn't find out before. Two years ago, maybe even one, he wouldn't've understood what that meant. What it was. He'd've expected it to make him angry, but it's been a long couple of days and maybe he's too tired: he just ends up sad instead. 

Thinks about _the only real thing in her world._ And maybe it's that heavy shell. Or maybe it just gets pulled in, like everything else. 

Steve dozes off by accident, where he's sitting. He wakes up at the very soft sound of boots hitting the floor in the front hall. 

The only light on's the one beside him, on the bedside table, and the evening finished getting dark while his eyes were closed so that the rest of the condo's dark and Steve's night-vision's kind of in shreds. 

Steve pushes himself up on his elbows, blinking and groggy and staring at what's basically just blue-dark, and then the light in the bathroom clicks on. 

He hesitates. Then he says, "Bucky?" And then because the silence sounds like it's listening he says, "Just c'mere?" 

For a second there's nothing, and then Bucky says, "I'm kind of . . . mud-spattered," his voice the kind of light that's half wary and Steve shakes his head even though Bucky can't see. 

At Bucky's voice, Abrikoska makes a ragged noise and jumps down off the bed, running out to the hall and out of Steve's sight. 

"Do you actually give a fuck?" Steve asks. "Because frankly right now - I don't." 

Another beat, and then the light flicks off, leaving faint shapes of after-images that fade pretty quickly. Steve hears Bucky murmur at the kitten in Russian, _Get out of my way, you stupid cat,_ and watches the darker shape come into the room and kick jeans off, trade them for sweats, and then Bucky's close enough for Steve to catch his arm and tug him towards the bed, and himself. 

Bucky's hair's damp, and Steve can feel the spots of grit on his skin, near his jaw and along his neck and the bare skin of his right arm that the t-shirt doesn't cover. Really doesn't care. Everything washes, and _God_ knows, they've both slept covered in worse. Bucky settles on his front, arm curved over Steve's waist, right leg over Steve's left and head on Steve's shoulder. 

For a beat, Steve's almost sure Bucky's going to ask him what his problem is, but he doesn't. 

Steve can feel him relax, slowly. Hips and low-back, letting go so gravity presses him closer against Steve's side, arm settling heavier. Not a lot. But enough to feel. 

Steve traces in and around the knuckles of Bucky's right hand with the tips of his fingers and then slides them down to curve fingers and palm around Bucky's forearm, stroking back and forth. And everything rolls towards the weight in the middle and he thinks there's something he should probably . . . do. 

"So," he says, and his voice rasps a little; he clears his throat and tries again. "I'm gonna say something," he starts, "and . . . I don't know if you're gonna want to answer or say anything or if there is anything to even say, or what, just, you should know I don't _need_ you to say anything. I just think I . . . should say this." 

He can feel Bucky tense up a little, but that's . . . kind of unavoidable. Wishes it wasn't, hopes someday it _won't_ be, but . . . right now, it is. 

He brushes the side of Bucky's arm with his thumb, palm still pressed against the Bucky's skin, and says, "Back when Bruce found the old photos, and you told me that it . . . it wasn't for me to feel guilty about - " he exhales, feeling Bucky go still, and says, "I get it. I think. As much as I can, anyway - I get it now." 

For a second, one pulse, one heart-beat, Bucky stays still. Completely, terrifyingly still. And one heart-beat is long enough for a prayer, just not long enough for one with words, and then it's over. 

Then Steve hears him breathe, feels it against his ribs and his side. One breath short and cut off, but the next one deep, rasping in and then out. And some of the wound-up tension goes, but Bucky's arm works all the way around until Bucky's hand is at Steve's hip with fingers digging in like something's trying to drag him away and he'll take Steve's bone and skin before he'll let it. 

And Steve's fine with that. 

He turns towards Bucky, slides himself down a little, so he can kiss Bucky's forehead and his eyes and stay there, left hand tangled in Bucky's hair. So Bucky's hand slides stuttering up to the middle of his back and closes in his shirt and Bucky can breathe close against Steve's throat. 

They stay like that. They don't sleep; you can't sleep like that. But they stay there for a while anyway.

*******

She finishes the day where she started it, on Clint's ridiculously deep and excessively soft couch. She's still in the long t-shirt she started out in, and she probably still smells like cigarettes, not that she can tell anymore - cigarettes, and probably the day's sweat and whatever else. When he comes in she's sitting cross-legged with one of the soft microfibre blankets crumpled around her - the ones that are in hideously bad taste but he always buys and uses till they're not soft anymore, because he wanted one as a kid and couldn't have it. 

Every life's made up of little scattered pieces. May told her that, once. 

Clint drops his coat on the floor, kicks his shoes off without bothering to tidy them into the shoe-rack, and acts like it's normal to find her here like this. He does point at the half-empty bottle she's holding and say, "I have it on good authority that stuff is an offense before God and Man," at the same time she pours herself one more shot and takes it. 

"Mmn," she agrees, around the mouthful of vodka; swallows, and adds, "that's why the first three shots were your basically-acceptable tequila, so I can't taste anything now anyway." She meets his eyes and manages a bitter smile. "I think I told you once the answer to this shit was vodka." 

"I think you did," Clint agrees. 

He goes to the kitchen, gets a beer from the fridge and comes to sit down on the other side of the couch. Natalia watches his face as he does, and thinks there might be more lines there. Wonders when she'll start to see them on herself. They're both getting older. Everyone gets older. 

Though given she could pass for twenty at fourteen, it'd just fucking round it off if she can still pass for twenty at fifty-four, too. 

"Why'd you end up at Barnes' and Rogers'?" Clint asks, and she looks at him, the same way she's been looking at him a long time. He's asking because he doesn't know, and he's curious. With most people there'd be something to that, an answer they want or something they want out of the answer, but Clint Barton's spent, fuck, more than a dozen years now _not wanting_ anything from her. Except maybe to know things he doesn't, and understand them. 

Even there he doesn't push. He's okay with not getting what he wants. There haven't been that many men in her life she can say that about. 

"I spent a few hours trying to be Nora," she tells him. "Didn't work. Only thing I could think of didn't make me feel worse was . . . checking on people." She pours herself another shot, but sips at this one this time, small swallows. "For once in his life, Stark made my life easier - Maria, him, Pepper, Ross, Banner, they're all fucking here. DC's a bit far," she goes on, "but I borrowed a computer with the right access - " and Clint looks amused and she keeps her tone bland, " - and he was active on his office's server, writing emails that sounded like him." She shrugs. "Knew where you were, May answered texts, leaves just two more people I can find, right now." 

She finishes the shot and stares at the floor. "Then I felt better sitting on that fucking roof than I did anywhere else. Until their pseudo-niece tattled on me and James decided to be a jerk." 

And Clint, she knows, will translate that right. And the next thought is like a sudden itch at the inside of her skull, the kind where you almost jump to scratch it because it stabs through you. She's probably going to regret letting it out, she's bound to regret saying a single fucking thing, but she does anyway. 

Looking at the texture of the couch upholstery, she says, "You didn't ask me to save you. Nine years ago, in Moscow" She makes herself move her gaze to him, to meet his eyes when she asks, "Why?" 

Clint frowns slightly, scans her face for a second, shrugs. "My head was ringing and I was bleeding a lot," he replies, "that doesn't usually add up to me at my most eloquent. You didn't have any better reason to listen to me than to him and I couldn't wring out my brain enough to come up with anything that could compete with hi - " 

"You know you're explaining why you didn't tell me to save myself," she interrupts. Knows she's abstracted, off, her head tilted to one side as she watches a few different feelings flicker across his face before he sighs and shrugs. "That's not what I asked you." 

Clint's quiet, still frowning but less, thinking. Thinking like he's trying to make sense of something. And it might be her. 

"Wasn't at the top of my priority list at the time," he tells her, eventually. 

Natalia closes her eyes for a moment, not sure she even knows what she - 

That she knows . . . anything. 

"That's stupid and sentimental," she says, startles herself by saying, "sentimental garbage," and he raises his beer-bottle slightly in salute. 

"Everyone's got some bad habits," he replies. And he's not being flip to hide something, he's just - 

There's no reason not to be. Sometimes she wonders how the fuck he didn't get killed or eaten alive, a long time before they ever could have met. 

And now she laughs, because . . . she can, she laughs and rubs her forehead with the side of her wrist. Closes her eyes, takes stock of how much the room spins, and gives herself one more half-shot before she leans over to put the bottle on the floor and toss the shot-glass after it. 

Every now and then she gets drunk, like this, because it's the only fucking way in the world to stop watching everything she says before she says it. To let go, a little. It's a dangerous trick and she knows better than to start needing it, but sometimes it's better than letting herself wind up until you could mistake her for James. The world doesn't need that, has never needed that: the world's just really _lucky_ , she thinks, that the one it already has comes with a soul that orbits Steve Rogers like a planet to a star. 

And okay, she thinks to her intoxicated mind, that was also sentimental garbage. And she is _drunk_ , but if she stops now she might sleep, and the hangover won't be as bad as it could be tomorrow. 

She's probably fucking kidding herself, there. 

"I fucking hate feeling like this," she says, to him, to the room, to all of fucking Creation. 

"I know," Clint says. "It'll pass." 

Natalia grabs the blanket and half-leans, half crawls over to put herself between him and the back of the couch, lean on his side, and she can only do that because his couch is fucking ridiculous. "And hey," he adds, "you're drunk, which means you can trade it for a hangover in about eight hours." 

"I'd rather have the hangover," Natalia says, firmly, half lying down and pulling the blanket up to her shoulders. 

"Can I remind you that tomorrow?" Clint asks and she snorts. He's warm the way almost all men are warm, and she can hear the soft hissing of how breathing sounds, through skin and bone. 

"No," she says, eyes closed. "I'll electrocute you, and you'll deserve it." 

"You can't electrocute me," Clint says, "Stark's still got your wristlets downstairs somewhere so he can mess around with them." 

"I am inventive, dedicated, and I have an above-average intelligence," she tells him. "I will find a way." 

Clint chuckles a little, rubs a hand down her back. Then he says, his voice buzzing through his ribs to her ear, "I may have told Steve your life-story today," in a voice that offers to be apologetic if she thinks it needs to. 

Natalia lets her eyes open. Takes that in. "I probably should have done that a long time ago," is what she ends up with, and it's probably true. It's a thought that floats up above the vodka, uneasily. She moves a little, so she can fold her arms up in front of her. "How awkward do you think it's going to be?" 

"Actually, I don't know," Clint admits, sounding surprised himself. "The guy keeps pulling the whole 'growing as a human being' thing, it makes him hard to nail down." 

She snorts a laugh, but she knows he's at least half-serious, and he's not wrong, either. 

Clint finishes his beer, leans over to put the bottle on the floor, and then pulls the blanket out a bit so it covers both of them, more or less. After a minute, Natalia feels the need to say, "For the record, I can tell you were smoking." 

"Go to sleep, Tasha," Clint says, absently, drowsy. "You're just guessing and you know it. There's no way you can smell anything over you smelling like an ash-tray anyway." 

She doesn't actually feel better. But she feels like she's got a better handle it anyway. So she closes her eyes, and lets herself try to sleep.


End file.
